


right before i close my eyes

by smc_27



Category: The Society (TV 2019)
Genre: F/M, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-23
Updated: 2020-11-23
Packaged: 2021-03-10 07:54:57
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,948
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27679709
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/smc_27/pseuds/smc_27
Summary: He’s sleeping in Cassandra Pressman’s bedroom, and his body hates him, and his house - the one comfort he has even such as it is - sits empty five streets over.
Relationships: Harry Bingham/Allie Pressman
Comments: 9
Kudos: 106





	right before i close my eyes

**Author's Note:**

> This is a fill for a prompt I received on tumblr. The prompt being "I never planned on falling for you."

The thing they take away from him as punishment for helping Campbell pull all that shit is his house. 

Well, they take something else from him, too, they just don’t know it. Because with Campbell locked up, Harry’s supply dries up, and it doesn’t take him long at all to run out of what he has socked away. Not at all. 

He’s sleeping in Cassandra Pressman’s bedroom, and his body hates him, and his house - the one comfort he has even such as it is - sits empty five streets over.

He has to listen to Alllie have quiet, pathetic sex with Will and there aren’t enough fucking pills in the world.

-

Turns out, withdrawal is not a thing you can do in secret. 

Will’s the one who finds him, who comes into Cassandra’s room because Harry hasn’t left in something like 12 hours. 

“The fuck’s wrong with you?” Will asks, and it sounds like he doesn’t give a single shit. But the more he looks at Harry, the more he seems to really realize something’s bad. He steps closer. “Dude.”

Harry’s shivering, has a bitch of a headache and is covered in sweat, his shirt wet with it and his hair pushed back. When he looked at himself in the mirror earlier, he looked a little blue. He’s sure that hasn’t changed. He just can’t make himself get up. 

Allie pushes into the room, gets right onto the bed with him, sits on her knees and gets her hands on him, pushing and pressing in places like she has any fucking clue what to do about any of this, either. 

She starts barking orders, and Harry...Maybe he just finally thinks someone will actually help him, because he lets himself drift off the way he’s wanted to for days. 

-

Her sneakers squeak on the linoleum in the clinic. She’s tossing a tennis ball up and down. It’s weird. The light is harsh. When Harry moves, he realizes there’s an IV in his arm and his body’s aching like crazy. His hands are shaking and his heart’s still racing. He can hear a monitor beeping. He doesn’t think anyone actually knows what any of this shit does. 

Harry blinks a little, and Allie stops with the ball and looks at him like she’s surprised he’s alive. 

“You look like shit,” he tells her, eyes half closed. His voice is raw and he feels like he could drink a gallon of water. 

Allie tilts her head and lets out a breath like she thinks she might want to laugh. “You’re one to talk.” He doesn’t know what to do other than shrug his shoulder. He’s having a hard time not thinking they should’ve just left him. “How are you feeling?”

He just looks at her. He’s...he’s immediately irritated and wants to ask her how the fuck she thinks he’s feeling. 

“Where is everyone?” he asks, because there’s no way Allie knows how to hook up an IV or knows what to do if something goes wrong. 

“It’s my turn. Kelly, Gordie and I are trading off.”

Hard to imagine a world in which those three are the ones who give enough of a fuck about him to keep watch, or whatever. 

He lets his eyes slip closed. He feels Allie’s hand on his forearm. He goes to sleep anyway.

-

Will won’t talk to him once he’s back at home. Back at the Pressman house. Which is, in some way, home. Whatever. Not having to talk to the guy isn’t as much of a punishment as Will thinks it is. 

Will isn’t talking to Allie either. 

“Trouble in paradise?” he asks Allie after Will leaves without saying anything. 

Allie cuts him a mean look and says, “Shut up, Harry.”

He holds his hands up to let her know he’ll drop it. 

Will starts sleeping in the basement. 

Harry almost wants to offer to trade so he doesn’t have to wake up every day and think about his worst mistake, but he thinks that’s kind of the point. 

-

He doesn’t do much. He doesn’t see many people. Kelly comes by sometimes. No one else gives a shit. Bean lives here too and she’s really nice and doesn’t have a problem with Harry, so that’s something. But even though she’s kind to him, he can’t convince himself she actually cares. 

Allie’s heating up cup noodles and asks him if he wants some. He’s in the living room playing FIFA on PS4 because apparently her dad had it. 

She comes and sits with him. 

“I feel like I’m dying,” she says, and he doesn’t really know what that’s about, so he just looks at her. 

“Been there.”

She huffs out a laugh at his dark joke. “I wanna sleep, but I can’t.”

“Why?” He wipes broth from his chin and thinks he sees her smiling at him for it. 

“Dreams.”

“Ah.” He purses his lips, nods. He remembers those. That’s one of the reasons he started with the pills heavy in the first place. To stop the dreams. “Been there, too.”

“I…” She stops herself, tucks her hair back behind her ear. He knows her just well enough to know that’s a nervous tick. “They go away when I’m not alone.”

He wants to tell her he could help with that, but he doesn’t know if he even means it, and he’s trying this thing where he doesn’t say things without intention. Kelly’s idea. It sucks. It means he’s quiet a lot. 

When they’re done eating, she challenges him to a match. She’s fucking awful. He forgot what his laugh sounded like until today. 

-

She’s drunk. He can tell. She’s not hiding it at all. 

She’s also sitting at the edge of his bed and it’s the middle of the night. He switches on the bedside lamp and squints at her. 

“What are you doing?” he asks. 

Because she doesn’t come in here. Except that one time she was looking for a sweater and barged in when he was reading, said “Aha!” when she pulled it out of Cassandra’s closet. And then she paused, froze, and said something in this sad fucking voice about Cassandra always stealing this one. 

Anyway. 

“I thought it might help me sleep.”

Harry sighs, rubs a hand down his face. 

He pins her with a look so she’ll maybe really hear him. 

“That’s a bad idea.”

She nods, closes her eyes, then asks, “Come for a walk?”

It’s like, 3am, but he thinks she’s gonna go either way, and figures they’re all fucked if something happens to her, so he tosses back the covers and pulls his coat on. 

-

It becomes kind of a thing. 

When she can’t sleep, she’ll come and wake him up and they’ll go for walks around town. Once, they even venture into the woods. They make it about 25 yards before they both get freaked out and then back around. 

And she starts talking to him. About the decisions she’s facing and the shit that’s going on. He doesn’t know if she’s telling him because she trusts him, or if she just knows he doesn’t have anyone to tell.

She asks him how he could fuck it up with Kelly, because she’s literally the best. Harry just laughs and says, “I’m just really good at fucking things up,” and Allie doesn’t argue, but she does laugh. He likes that. 

It’s just warm enough that the snow is starting to melt. Everything is wet and brown and gross, but he kind of likes the way it smells out here and how it’s not so cold it hurts his lungs to breathe. 

“Who was your first crush?” he asks, and they’ve started doing this, too. Talking shit. Lightening the mood on the way back towards the house so she can maybe get a couple hours of sleep in and turn her brain off. 

She laughs. “Who do you think?”

Harry grins at her, raises a brow. “Me?”

“No,” she says, like that’s a crazy thought and of course he’s wrong. Which. Yeah, hanging out with Allie definitely keeps him humble. “Luke.” Harry rolls his eyes. Of course. “You were more like third. Maybe fourth.”

He doesn’t know what to say to that. He just smiles down towards his shoes, and then she’s pushing her shoulder against his. 

“Yours?”

Harry wants to be honest, but she’ll definitely think he’s just shit talking. 

“You,” he says quietly, because he thinks me maybe if he sounds sincere, she’ll realize he is. She’s just watching him. He sort of rolls his eyes again when he sees that she seems to be flattered or smug about it. “I told you. You were my first kiss.”

Allie laughs loudly and shoves him. He sort of stumbles down off the sidewalk and then joins her again and they start talking about something else. Something else that doesn’t remind them of that night at his house. Probably for the best. 

-

Everyone in the house gets knocked on their asses by a cold in early April. Harry doesn’t want to leave his room, sleeps as much as he can and tries to have a bunch of fluids, cause that’s what his mom always told him to do. 

He hears Will coughing and wheezing downstairs. Hears Allie sniffling in her room. Hears Bean sneeze. He figures he’ll go start the kettle for tea, stops to ask Bean and Allie what kind they’d like before he goes downstairs. 

He makes some for everyone, leaves a mug for Will on the counter and tells him it’s there, and gets thanks in return. They’re...cordial. Which is an improvement from openly hostile. 

He goes to Allie last, and she’s asleep when he goes into her room. He sets down the mug and stands next to her bed. He can’t really help himself, reaches out and pushes her hair back off her face. She opens her eyes long enough to see him and give him a little smile, then closes them again. 

Harry goes back to his own room. He does not do a very good job of not thinking about her. 

-

He can hear her through the thin wall between their rooms. Because by now he knows all the normal sounds of this house, and hearing Allie awake in the middle of the night is one of them. 

But tonight, he gives up on waiting for her to come collect him to go for a walk. And then just when he’s about to fall asleep, he hears a heavy breath, and then another, and he knows what Allie sounds like when she feels good. He’s heard those breaths right in his ear before. And then there’s this little gasp, which is a hot sound he’s definitely not supposed to hear. 

He closes his eyes and positions his pillow to muffle any other things he might hear, because he’s not a fucking creep, okay?

20 minutes later, she’s pushing his door open, and then when they’re outside, she laughs and pushes at his shoulder and asks why he’s being so quiet. 

He says, “Just thinking,” which isn’t even a lie. 

-

He doesn’t think he’s ever wanted to kiss her as badly as he does when they’re at home alone and she’s polishing her toenails in the living room, her jeans rolled up and her hair all pulled over her left shoulder. He doesn’t even know what it is about this that does it for him. She’s singing some Shawn Mendes song that was popular when they were younger. 

He just likes her. Cares about her. 

“Hey,” she says, smiling, when she looks up and sees him leaning there against the banister at the bottom of the stairs. “I thought you were home, but didn’t want to bug you.”

“You never bug me,” he tells her, and that feels too heavy but it also makes her give him a look he really likes, so. He goes to sit next to her. He sees her fingernails are already done. She’s using gold, which feels appropriate for her. “Pretty.” 

She hums, gets back to work. “I was really into jewel tones for a while.” He doesn’t know what to do with that. “My mom had all this like, muted pink nail polish. Cassandra had all the metallics.”

It freaks him out, sometimes, how she can so casually talk about her sister. He still can’t really do that with his dad. Really no surprise she’s stronger than him. 

“My mom always got hers done at the salon,” he tells her. She gives him a smile, then swipes some polish onto her pinky. “Standing appointment. She used to take my sister sometimes.”

“That’s sweet.”

He can’t remember the last time he thought of his mom as sweet. Or anything closely resembling something warm or kind.

She stops, rests her cheek on her knee and looks at him. He knows her well enough by now to be able to tell when she’s about to say something deep or serious. She’s told him before he’s the only one she really tells things to anymore. He said he thinks she’s maybe always been the only one he tells things to. 

“Do you think they’re still out there somewhere?”

Harry pulls in a breath. He’s thought about this. He’s thought about this a lot. 

“Yeah,” he says quietly. Allie barely acknowledges it, just keeps looking at him. “They have to be, right? If this is an alternate universe, it means the other one’s still there.”

She presses her lips together, which is just a thing she does so often that it shouldn’t be notable. But he knows she does it when she’s holding something back, or isn’t sure how it’ll land. 

“I think about that thing Kelly said all the time.” He doesn’t know what that means. Kelly’s one of the few people who talks to the both of them often enough that maybe he should know what she’s referring to. “About...maybe we were saved.”

Harry scoffs. That’s a fucking insane idea. He literally almost died. He got addicted to any pill he could get his hands on, and was depressed, and he can’t count on two hands the number of times since they got here that he just wishes he’d die. 

The idea that they were somehow saved…

“It’s hard to imagine a scenario worse than this,” he says, and maybe it sounds shitty, because honestly, sitting here with her is…

If someone asked when it happened, he wouldn’t be able to give an answer, but any time he’s with Allie is sort of the best he feels. 

“That’s what I’m afraid of,” she says, and he sort of freezes at that. “If what they’re dealing with _is_ worse than this.” 

Harry leans back against the sofa. She’s making him feel like shit, though he knows that’s not her intention. 

Allie reaches for his left hand and polishes his pinky nail gold. She blows on it a little, and he’s just watching her. She laughs and says she’s surprised he let her. Honestly, it’s about the least surprising thing he can think of. He thinks he’d let her do anything. 

-

He’s having a nap because there’s fuck all else to do, and he was on an early shift this morning in the caf, so he was up and out of the house with Will, actually. They...They’re not friends. They talk like acquaintances would. Will’s no longer shitty towards him, and Harry doesn’t have the energy to be anything but precisely as polite as he needs to be. 

He wakes up when he hears Allie say, “That’s bullshit,” in an angry voice, and he stretches in bed and hears Will’s voice, too. He can't make out what the guy’s saying, because he thinks Will’s way of fighting is worse. He gets quiet when he’s mad. “This has nothing to do with him.”

Honestly, Harry doesn’t know what they’re fighting about, and he wouldn’t have cared at all, except...He just has a feeling the _him_ they’re talking about is himself. It’s not like Allie and Will are alone a lot anymore. They talk about governing and shit, and they can still joke or whatever like friends would do. Harry doesn’t know the details of why they broke up, but he knows it was Allie’s idea and that Will was a fuckling baby about it for way too long to be considered normal or reasonable. Which Harry remembers not being surprised by in the slightest.

“You’re with him all the time. You think I don’t know that? It’s been months, Allie, of you sneaking off in the middle of the night to...to do god knows what.”

“To do _whatever I want_ , because it’s none of your business or your concern.”

Yeah, Harry’s very interested in how she’s definitely not shooting down the notion that they’re fucking.

(He doesn’t even like thinking of it like that. It’s crass. It’s too crude for what he actually feels for her. This unnamed thing probably the only person other than himself could actually label is her.) 

“Are you in love with him, or something?” Will asks, and Harry feels his heart race. 

There’s a pause. And then Allie says, “Does it matter to you if I am?” in a voice that…

Harry just can’t tell if she’s like, begging Will to tell her he still has feelings for her, or if she’s challenging him, saying that if his friendship is contingent on whether or not she has feelings for Harry, then Will can go fuck himself. 

“I don’t know how you can trust him. I don’t know how you can know all the shit he’s done and still…”

Allie cuts him off. “People aren’t irredeemable, Will,” she says all quietly, like she really believes it. Like she believes it about Harry. “You’re not perfect, either. And I still forgave you after all that shit last year.” 

Harry really doesn’t know the details of her relationship with WIll. He doesn’t know what she’s talking about. But he figures it has something to do with how Will was with Kelly, and then immediately with Allie. Harry thinks he’ll always think Will’s kind of the worst for that. Because neither Allie nor Kelly deserve it. They’re literally the two best people in this whole fucking place. 

“If you get together with him, I’m moving out.”

Harry almost wants to laugh, except they’d hear him. The fact that Will thinks his absence would be a punishment is…

And Allie just says, “Okay,” like she’s not backing down.

What the fuck is happening?

Will leaves her room, but Allie doesn’t, and Harry lies still in bed and stares up at the ceiling. He’s pretty sure Allie feels about him the way he feels about her. The thing that’s fucking him up is the idea that other people know it. That other people have seen it before him. What does she do and say about him when he’s not around? Because he’s never really with her when she’s with other people. 

He doesn’t want to agree with Will about anything ever, but he does sort of think the idea that Allie’s too good for him is kind of true. But Harry...He’s always been the kind to just selfishly want what he wants. If Allie wants him, too, he’s not going to think too hard about whether or not she deserves more. He’s going to take everything she’s willing to give. He knows this about himself. Even if he’s trying to be better, there’s still that, too.

-

Kissing her is an impulse. One he’s so far been able to control. But she’s walking next to him and it’s warm out, her little tank top flowing away from her body in a way that makes him want to get his hands under it. And she looks up and says, “I’ve always loved stars. You know that?”

And he does. He does know that. He’s spent a fucking insane amount of time watching that necklace move at the base of her throat. 

“I know.” She turns to him, smiles like she’s really happy with that answer, and he just...He puts his hand up on her cheek and goes for it. He doesn’t even think. He just does it. She doesn’t really respond. Not really. Her hands don’t touch him and while she leans in and not away, he just… He’s not exactly getting the green light. He pulls away, breathes, “Fuck.”

It feels like a mistake. If only because she didn’t want it, maybe. He takes a step back, ready with an apology he really does mean, but Allie’s fingers go around his wrist and she moves with him, takes a step forward to keep them close. Her eyes are right on him when he looks at her, though he still has his head bowed a little. 

They’re literally stopped on the sidewalk in front of the elementary school. What was he thinking?

“What was that?” she asks, and Harry thinks he’s heard that from her before. He thinks she’s said it before. He says her name, wants to touch her, and maybe it’d be welcome, but he just needs to be really sure. “Why did you kiss me?”

“I dunno.” It’s the first lie he’s told her in ages. It feels bad. “No, that’s not true.” She laughs a little, his wrist still held in her hand. She’s blinking up at him like she’d really be fine just kissing some more. He’s gotta ignore that. It’s important that they talk about things and don’t just act on their urges. “I never planned on falling for you.”

Her brows go up, and it puts this soft little look on her face, and Harry just...He reaches for her with his free hand, holds her hip, and then she smiles, which might make him feel like he’s actually doing something right for once. 

“You kissed me because you’re falling for me?” she asks, and it sounds like she’s teasing, but also like she knows he’s going to be honest with her no matter what. 

He swallows, nods, and then figures he can really go for it. “Have fallen?”

Maybe he’s not _in love with her_ , but he’s pretty fucking close. He doesn’t not love her. He thinks he loves her. 

She tilts her head, brings her arms up around his neck and presses all up against him. She’s looking at his mouth. God, he wants to take her home. 

“I never planned on this either.” 

Is it wrong that he sort of wants more than that? 

“On what?” 

He watches her smile. “You.” He breathes out a laugh. That’s not… “You falling for me.”

He pulls back, looks down. But Allie holds him close, threads her hands into his hair and leans up on her toes, gives him this teasing little kiss he thinks might be the hottest thing in the world. “No, don’t.” He glances up at her. She’s so fucking pretty. “I’m not sure what it is I feel for you.” He nods. That’s...honest. He appreciates that. “But it’s a lot.”

She rolls her eyes a little when he grins at her. 

“Good to know,” he says, and then...like, can they kiss again, or? “I’ve been on your mind?”

“Mm.” 

Harry’s got...he’s got a lot of thoughts about this. About her thinking about him. About how long maybe that’s been going on. About how serious this feels, even here, where a future is hard to imagine.

But Allie’s tongue presses gently against his bottom lip, and he moves his hand up onto her waist under her shirt, and she says his name into his mouth, which is pretty much one of the hottest things he’s ever experienced. And maybe he doesn’t need to think so fucking hard about it, you know?

-

Allie calls Will’s bluff. He doesn’t move out when he catches her and Harry making out in the kitchen late one night when they thought everyone else was asleep. No one else really seems to give a shit, honestly. Bean seems entirely unaffected, says she’s seen it coming for a while and just wanted to let it play out until and unless she had to intervene if things got weird. 

Allie and him never really hang out in his room. Which everyone’s calling his room, except for him. Because it’s very much Cassandra’s, still, right down to the Harry Styles poster he never bothered taking off the wall. 

The first night he sleeps in Allie’s room, they’ve come back from a walk and it’s late and she’s holding his hand in hers and doesn’t let go like usual at her bedroom door. She just blinks up at him, says, “Stay with me?”

Harry doesn’t even pretend to hesitate, honestly. 

-

She tells him she loves him when he’s got his face between her legs and so he doesn’t really think anything of it and decides he shouldn’t stop now to ask questions. 

She doesn’t acknowledge it, either, or say anything afterward. He falls asleep in her bed with her, which is barely even notable, since he can’t really remember the last time he slept anywhere else. 

All that to say, he does think she meant it, and he does think it’s a big deal. But he also thinks she’s not going to say it again, not like that, and that maybe that’s fine, too. 

-

She comes with him to get some things from his house. Mickey and a bunch of people still live there. Harry only brought winter clothes with him when he moved, and now that it’s warm out, he’s sort of run up against the limit of how long he can stretch wearing jeans and pants. It’s pushing 95 degrees out, and he figures it’s time. 

No one’s claimed his room. Mickey shrugs his shoulders when he lets them in, says it didn’t feel right. Harry thanks him, though he feels a sort of weird detachment from the place. The last time he was here, he was high and scared and felt fucking awful. Being back just reminds him of all that. 

But then, as he’s tossing things from his drawers into his duffle, Allie sits back on his bed, her hands braced behind her, and parts her knees just enough to make him have to suck in a deep breath. 

“Memories, right?” she asks, glint in her eye. It’s like 1 in the afternoon and there’re a dozen people in this house. He’s not about to… “God, if I’d known then.” 

Harry throws a couple tee shirts into the bag and puts his hand on his hip. “If you’d known what?”

She crooks her finger at him, which is ridiculous and hot, so he walks over. She parts her legs a little more. She’s wearing this pink dress with flowers on it and he’s having a lot of thoughts. 

“You, maybe,” is what she comes out with, which…

Look, he’s still not the guy who holds back when he thinks someone’s full of shit. 

He shakes his head, though she slips her fingers into the pockets of his jeans and pulls, leans back and kind of makes him fall forward a bit over her. Which he likes. It’s just that she’s talking like he’s the same person he was then. 

“I think your memory of me when we first got here is a little skewed.” 

Her brow furrows. “No, it isn’t.”

He breathes a laugh, and slides his hand up her thigh under her dress, because honestly he’s been thinking about it all day and he’s got the opportunity, so. 

“Most of what I said to you back then was just me hitting on you. I was a mess,” he reminds her, and she loops her finger around the curl that’s dangling down at his forehead. 

“Maybe. But you’re a mess that I wanted.” She’s not that deep. There’s something… “Taylor Swift?”

Harry laughs, kisses her. “I think I’m better now,” he admits, and he’s been thinking it for a while, and he thinks the reason he’s never said it out loud - not to her or anyone else - is he doesn’t want them to say he’s wrong. 

Allie moves her hands up, her elbows knocking into his arms, and then puts her palms right against his face. 

“I know,” she says, is looking right at him like maybe she knows he needs it. She kisses him fast, then pushes at him so he’ll get up. “Let me help you so we can go home.”

Harry doesn’t correct her. Because he doesn’t think she’s wrong. He just reaches for her hand to help her up, and then she mostly messes around, smelling the bottles of cologne he’s got atop the dresser, talking to him about the things he’s throwing in the bag. She asks if she can have his Harvard tee shirt, the one his dad got him when he got early acceptance. He asks if she’ll wear it later with those little white underwear she’s got on under her dress. 

She says, “If you’re lucky,” as she tucks it, and what she’s deemed her favourite bottle of fragrance, down into the duffle bag. 

Harry grins to himself and reaches for a few last things. He’s really never thought he had good luck at all. But the strap of Allie’s dress slips down off her shoulder, and he reaches out to fix it for her and she lets him, and he thinks maybe he should give himself a little more credit for what he’s done to turn things in his favour.


End file.
